Children of the Revolution
by Proton Star
Summary: Mystique has always had her own ideas about what the Brotherhood should be. After the events on Alcatraz leave her in charge, she's going to make sure she has the time to carry out those plans. Part 5 of the Becoming series.


Title: Children of the Revolution

Author: Proton Star

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, Marvel do. This iteration is 20th Century Fox's. No money is being made from this.

Fandom: X-Men (most particularly X-Men: First Class, but also bits of X-Men 2 and 3 and some parts of X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

Series: Part 5 of Becoming. Part 1 can be found here - s/9557059/1/The-Mind-Is-A-Fortress-And-Life-Is-A-Siege , part 2 here - s/11012804/1/All-The-Things-She-Said-Running-Through-My-Head, part 3 here - s/11374084/1/The-Turning-Of-The-Leaves and part 4 here - s/11731156/1/Early-Autumn-By-The-Swimming-Pool

Characters: Mystique, Hank McCoy and Nightcrawler.

Ratings/Warnings: PG-12.

Spoilers: For X-Men 2 and X-Men 3.

Notes: I started to write this after First Class, and was trying to tie it to the previous X-Men films. And then DOFP was released so everything has been thoroughly Jossed.

Summary: Mystique has always had her own ideas about what the Brotherhood should be. After the events on Alcatraz leave her in charge, she's going to make sure she has the time to carry out those plans.

* * *

Mystique followed Hank to the meeting, to make sure that the authorities weren't tailing him. It wasn't that she didn't trust him, she didn't trust his Secret Service escort not to follow him when he asked them not to. Not least of all because Hank was only asking them not to, not ordering them to stay behind, because Hank still didn't seem to understand that the point of power was using it sometimes.

It looked like Hank had the same doubts about the agents as he took a difficult-to-follow path to the refurbished Methodist hall. Hank climbed over walls and ran along buildings, tricky for a human but not for her.

She landed behind him, and he didn't even jump in surprise when she did. She suspected it was because he could hear her coming with his boosted hearing. "I'm happy to see you're well," said Hank mildly as he straightened his suit out.

"You could have come instead of him." Hank would know what she was talking about.

"I thought it would be for the best." Mystique looked at him, making it quite clear what she thought of Hank's thought process, and he did at least have the decency to look a little guilty. He opened the door for her. "After you, my dear." Age really hadn't helped Hank's intrinsic awkwardness, and Mystique had no idea if it was moving into politics that had caused Hank to put on an attitude that Mystique thought had gone out with Charles's university lecturers, or if it was Hank s way of creating a public persona to protect his private one. Mystique, more than most people, understood that.

Mystique had wondered at the location of the summit, because that was what this meeting was. The world was full of repurposed churches, she'd spent time in enough of them on their crusade, but why choose this one? She suspected Hank had his reasons. Mystique had called for this meeting, asked to meet Hank in his official role, because she'd decided on a few things while she'd been waiting for the X-Men to contact her, and finalised her plans as she waited for her powers to return completely. The way things had been going couldn't continue, not if the Brotherhood wanted to win in the long-term. With the "cure" and everything that went with it, it was time to consider what their role was, what their role should be, and how to best accomplish their aims. And they couldn't do that, not properly, not easily, not openly, if they were being hunted by the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, not to mention all kinds of Special Ops teams.

She knew to expect Hank, as the government's representative, the mutant she knew only as Storm as the X-Men's representative, and Angel as moral support, but more officially as an unaligned mutant. While the government had to be represented here to make the announcement even semi-official (and she knew Hank had to have pulled lots of strings to keep it this informal but she refused to go anywhere where she might get captured again), the people Mystique cared about telling were her fellow mutants so she'd asked for this to be witnessed by people that weren't part of the Brotherhood, the X-Men or the Government.

That her son was one of the unaligned mutants at the meeting she put down to Hank trying to interfere, again. She knew Wolverine wouldn't be attending, she'd been within earshot when he'd told Hank that it wasn't his fight. There was a time she'd have thought that that was arrogance, and an attempt to set himself apart from his fellow mutants to deny what he was, but if he'd survived everything that Jean could do, Jean who even when she was a child could have destroyed them all, then he might have been as immortal as he thought he was and then it really wasn't his fight.

She wasn't expecting the man who was welcoming everyone in.

It was Sean.

Going grey, with a beard, but Sean nonetheless.

She had, sort of, assumed that he was dead. So many of her old friends were. Charles hadn't said anything to that effect, but then again, there'd never been an opportunity for him to do so.

She tried not to gawk. Sean didn't even bother to hide his astonishment, laughing as he shook her hand. Definitely Sean.

They got down to business soon enough, all of them sat round an oak table that had seen better days, despite the better efforts of Sean and Hank, who would quite happily have chatted away until the sun went down.

The gathering frustrated Mystique somehow, they were supposed to be doing this for all mutantkind, but instead it was the same faces as always, two of them even had her blood in their veins, and another two were old, old friends. They should have moved beyond this. It all spoke towards her idea being right and that her plan was the only way forward.

Hank set his laptop up to record the meeting, so that it was slightly more official, and chronicled for history. He also put himself in charge of writing the minutes, which was just too bad for whoever in the Mutant Rights Department because she'd seen Hank's handwriting and it was unintelligible.

The statement she gave on behalf of the Brotherhood of Mutants, by right of being the last member standing, fully powered and not in jail, was short. The ceasefire she offered was not unconditional. She would be allowed to carry on unmolested, and her fellow mutants from the raid on the Worthington facility in San Francisco would be let out of jail. In return, the Brotherhood would cease all violent activity, provided that the Government stopped work on the mutant "cure" and their registration programme.

That was where Hank argued a little. He wasn't sure that the government could just release everyone, particularly Magneto who had destroyed a national monument, and John, who'd be standing with him all the way.

Mystique made it clear that it was all of them or nothing.

There was more to-ing and fro-ing, and Hank using several internet proxies so he could contact the President to check exactly how far Hank's powers as Secretary for Mutant Affairs stretched. The President had the same doubts as Hank, with less understanding of why the Brotherhood did what they did, and more fear, also because he didn't understand them. Eventually Hank talked him round, and she didn't know when he'd learnt to argue like that, but Hank had picked up the talent and won the argument.

He convinced Mystique to actually talk to the President, tried to act as a go-between from their world to that of the mundanes.

And wasn't that an irony, or something, that the shy science geek she'd known and, and she was old enough to admit this now without qualifications, loved, who'd thrown away anything they could have had because he couldn't stand himself, was now the one of them that was a visibly out mutant, blue and furry on the nation's TV screens, while, outside of times like this, she was still hiding under a face that wasn't her own.

The President seemed sincere about sticking to the promises Hank had made on his behalf but politicians were good actors. It probably wouldn't matter in the long run, this was a ceasefire, not a surrender, and it would only take a couple of weeks to get the Brotherhood up and running again if the government broke its word.

Virtual handshakes having been exchanged, the meeting sort of broke down into a series of conversations, everyone picking up from where they'd left off the last time they spoke, which only emphasised how small their community was.

It was Sean's story that interested her, because he'd always gone along with what Charles wanted, without much comment. This didn't feel like something Charles was involved with.

"I started this place in '83. Sometimes there's kids who just don't take to the School, but they still need a roof over their heads. I try and give them that and a little more, Charles put to some times." That didn't answer why. "They hurt my baby girl." That'd do it. Mystique didn't even know that he had a daughter, and asked after her, the way you did when you ran into old friends. Sean enthusiastically told her all about Siryn.

Storm was passing as he was saying all of this, "Wait, you're Siryn's dad?"

"Yeah." Sean shook his head, then squinted, looking at Storm as though he'd never seen her before, then said, "you're the weather girl!"

Storm nodded, and immediately wanted to know how Siryn was. Mystique heard enough to know that when whatever happened to Sean's daughter happened, Storm was caught up in it. And it must have been bad, because Sean was the most even tempered of them and the least likely to hold a grudge, which okay, wasn't saying much but still.

Sean and Storm's conversation wandered away from her, and Kurt walked over from where he'd been talking to Hank. He'd probably been waiting for her to be free, as timid as he had been last time they met. "I am going to Russia. Hank has been doing some research and he thinks my father may have ended up there." Which was more than Hank had ever told her, but then again, she hadn't asked. She doubted it would lead to anything. She knows this much about Azazel, if he could have got back to her, to what he thought was a them, then he would have done. There's very little that could have stopped an alive and determined teleporter.

Kurt had carried on. "Piotr has said he will come with me to speak Russian for me." She has no idea which of Charles's children Piotr is, but she hoped he was big and strong, and able to cope with Kurt's disappointment when his mission failed. Because Azazel was dead. And if he wasn't, well, dead was better than the other option. They all knew how bad the US government was, but Mystique doubted the Soviets had treated their mutants any better. If Azazel wasn't dead, they had him imprisoned for more than twenty years, doing goodness knew what to him during that time.

Mystique didn't give Kurt her blessing, which she thought was what he wanted, but she didn't try to stop him either. It was up to him to make his own mistakes.

She d done everything she needed to do here, it was time to go. She was going while no-one was paying attention to her, just in case someone had followed them here. She needed to stay free for this to work.

As she left, Mystique saw Sean and Angel in a corner, they seemed to be sharing tips on how to deal with bringing up fifteen children at a time. Angel smiled as she saw Mystique leave. They'd catch up later. Mystique had one more person to talk to before she could put her plan into action.

* * *

End notes: Spoilers for Days of Future Past follow.

That Angel and Sean are both alive and well in this fic is a complete accident, I swear, because I started writing Becoming long before DOFP was released.

The same applies for me accidentally having the nucleus of Excalibur going off and having adventures.

I will however admit that the hat-tip at Sean's role as housemaster for Gen-X is completely deliberate.


End file.
